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Wednesday, August 12, 2009

viXra Rules

Poor Carl. All through the arxiv saga, he wanted to give the arxiv moderators the benefit of the doubt. He never complained when the gravity paper was moved to General Physics. But now, Carl has tried to post another paper on General Physics. It is most assuredly a completely innocent paper about certain aspects of quantum information theory, and contains no offensive material of any kind. Nonetheless, the paper was removed from General Physics, and Carl received an email, which starts:

I admire Carl's persistence in trying to get arXiv to play fair. How can they say that a paper like Carl's is inappropriate without giving any justification? I don't see how it fits any of the "potential reasons for removal" that they mention on the moderation page. They say you can appeal of course, but that is difficult when they don't reveal why they remove in the first place.

On the subject of viXra, it has just celebrated its first month by flying past the 100th paper mark. The administrators (that's me and my spaniel) will be away for a week enjoying the clear air of the Vosgian mountains, so don't worry about the lack of new papers during that time.

"arXiv moderators will suggest the removal of a submission that violates arXiv policies in some way. Potential reasons for removal are:

"Inappropriate format. ..."Inappropriate topic. While arXiv serves a variety of scientific communities, not all subjects are currently covered. Submissions that do not fit well into our current classification scheme may be removed and, where possible, redirected to a more appropriate repository."Duplicated content. ..."Submission of copyrighted material. ..."Excessive submission rate. ..."

"Inappropriate topic" seems to be the censorship criterion here, despite the fact that it doesn't contain any "offensive" material:

"While arXiv serves a variety of scientific communities, not all subjects are currently covered. Submissions that do not fit well into our current classification scheme may be removed ..."

This "fit well" clause would have enabled arXiv to delete the works of Copernicus's solar system, Darwin's evolution, and others who put doing science before trying to "fit in well" with the work of their contemporaries.

Rhys, Re first two sections being more complicated. Well the first section is just an introduction and I can't get away without it. The second section introduces pure density matrix formalism which is much simpler and easier to use than the usual spinor formalism.

Uh, sorry for ignoring your comment. I read the first sentence, "I think I was being a bit silly", and didn't read the rest. I'll type something up over there.